The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday that it had ruled that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, “threaten the public health” of Americans, and would now be federally regulated. The ruling immediately prompted warnings from industry groups that any such regulations would be unworkable, and come at an intolerable economic cost, and also prompted a serious legal challenge from a Washington, D.C. based policy group that it will sue the EPA to force it to reverse its decision.

“The EPA’s science rests in large part on the work of scientists that are at the centre of Climategate,” said Marlo Lewis, senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Mr. Lewis was referring to a scandal at one of the world’s most influential climate research centres, in which emails were discovered suggesting that scientists there manipulated and censored temperature records to bolster their research.

The EPA, Mr. Lewis said, has based its finding on reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. Their reports, in turn, rely heavily on research from the same scientists from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit whose research practices and ethics are now the subject of an investigation.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has successfully used the courts to compel Washington to back off far-reaching climate change efforts before: in 2000, its lawsuit resulted in a settlement in which the Clinton administration agreed to renounce controversial climate-change research deployed by the EPA, because it relied on “discredited” research.

The EPA’s endangerment ruling could allow the Obama administration to regulate emissions without approval from lawmakers in Congress and the Senate.

President Barack Obama did not make clear whether he would allow the EPA to bypass elected representatives, raising questions of whether the EPA move was a symbolic gesture in advance of international negotiations began at climate talks in Copenhagen. But a White House spokesman said the president prefers legislation, rather than regulation, to curb greenhouse gases.

“This is very significant in the sense that if ... the Senate fails to adopt legislation [overpowering the EPA], then the administration will have the authority to regulate,” Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said.

The Copenhagen talks opened this week and will welcome 110 world leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Mr. Obama will attend a closing summit.

The EPA itself acknowledges that restricting CO2 at the levels dictated by the act would impose regulation on more than 6 million American businesses, including minor emitters such as hotels, malls, and restaurants. Officials have suggested they will relax limits temporarily, something Mr. Lewis says it has no authority to do without the consent of Congress. Currently, only about 15,000 American businesses are regulated by the EPA for dangerous emissions.

“The EPA acknowledges that this would basically crash those permitting programs. They would collapse under their own weight,” Mr. Lewis said. “They simply don’t have the resources to process that many permit applications. You’d have millions of businesses all of a sudden thrust into legal limbo and tens of thousands that would face delays in building new facilities or modifying existing facilities. In other words a huge monkey wrench thrown into the U.S. economy.”

The Clean Air Act enforced by the EPA limits emissions of harmful compounds -- originally used for toxic chemicals -- to 25 tonnes annually.

Keith McCoy, vice president of energy policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, said the EPA is moving forward with an agenda that will “put additional burdens on manufacturers, cost jobs and drive up the price of energy.”

In its first statement at the conference, Canada called for a long-term agreement that would see global emissions peak by 2020 and halved by 2050, with industrialized countries reducing emissions by up to 80%. The position also calls for Canada to take on a less ambitious goal than other developed countries, with a goal of reducing Canadian emissions by up to 70% from 2006 levels.

Canada is calling for major emerging economies as China, India and Brazil to commit to measurable actions to reduce their emissions growth.

“It is very much in our interest to have an agreement negotiated in Copenhagen,” Environment Minister Jim Prentice said Monday in the House of Commons during the daily question period. “Our country is prepared to shoulder its fair share of responsibility under that agreement.”

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